Tag Archives: refugees

Imagine being an undocumented person of Hispanic ethnicity (because when we speak about immigration we mean brown/Hispanic, not Canadian). Imagine you’ve lived here a couple of decades and never known another country. Maybe you don’t even speak Spanish. Now imagine that immigration sweeps are taking people in your situation into custody, putting them in some form of confinement and deporting them. You would probably be frightened, feel vulnerable and, being human, you might even be angry. What might you do? Well, Gentle Reader, wait a few paragraphs and I’ll share an un-sunny prediction.

Imagine further that while you, feeling like a stranger in a land that once felt like your own land, fear being swept up, while at the same time, you see people marching for further admission of Middle Eastern Refugees. You might well wonder why you are made to feel unwelcome and at the same time, strangers are brought in, welcomed and subsidized.

Make no mistake about my intentions here. I support both immigrants (people looking for a better future for themselves and their children) and refugees (people fleeing for their lives). Still, some unease, hostility and despair could be anticipated from Hispanics. As we drive the welcome wagon up for the refugees and deploy Migra and finger cuffs for Hispanics, tensions could arise or even explode.

Meanwhile, lots of Anglos complain that Hispanics are taking jobs away from “real Americans.” Truthfully, they’re taking damn few jobs away from Anglos—most of whom are not lining up to harvest our crops, wash our dishes, build our housing and care for our children. Yet another group of real Americans has a greater claim than Anglos to feeling displaced by low wage Hispanic labor, and that is African-Americans. It is true that undocumented workers drive wages down that might otherwise be attractive to American citizens. This fact creates, or exacerbates, fissures between some Black and Brown people.

Neither minority is likely, in large numbers, to join in welcoming our newest refugees from the war torn Mid East. This is really a pity for many reasons but perhaps a central irony is that the number of refugees we are likely to admit will be statistically insignificant and will have no actual impact on either the job market or the economy. However, symbolically their admission will be felt like a slap in the face.

So, now let’s assume that we have Islamophobic Anglos, vulnerable Hispanics and further marginalized African-Americans. Of course this would not be every member of these communities or even most. It’s likely to be from the lower socio-economic quartile. However small it might be, it isn’t good for the already fraying fabric of our society.

Now let’s add guns to the equation. Remember the NRA started out as a gun control organization, wanting to keep guns out of the hands of certain segments of the population. When this was not successful, they shifted to making sure that white folks could be well armed (though not requiring a well-regulated militia). The NRA has been telling its members, and the public at large, that they should be armed, not simply against potential criminals, but against the Federal Government. They have raised the specter of government agents rounding people up and predicted that without guns, the public would be vulnerable to federal tyranny. They have argued that both Fascists and Communists disarmed the people and then subjugated them. They have held that if only the Jews in Germany had been well armed, they could have resisted Hitler and possibly avoided being rounded up and slaughtered.

So, here’s the thing: Hispanics have probably heard these arguments for guns. Some young males might well believe that if well armed they might be able to fight the Feds, and they might be able to avoid being rounded up, imprisoned and deported. This is a delusion, but delusion seems to be rampant in many segments of society today.

What isn’t either delusional or paranoid is that protections are disappearing for immigrants. The policy of prioritizing for deportation people convicted of felonies is expanding to: Probable cause to believe an immigrant committed a felony. No trial is necessary. The right to stop people on mere suspicion and demand papers is morphing into a duty to demand papers. The policy of immediately deporting people here fewer than two weeks is changing to two years. “Dreamers,” suspected of status violations, are not safe. Communities of color will become less safe as people fear involving the police or legal system in their lives.

Refugees are pouring out of Afghanistan, Iraq and what’s left of Syria. Some are driven by the universal human desire for better lives for themselves and their families. Some are driven by fear for their lives. They are escaping from violence, from chaos, from starvation and from hopelessness—the hopelessness of being kept in squalid camps, in unsanitary conditions, with less food this year than last. The difference between a refugee and a migrant may be clear in a dictionary; but on the ground, in the hungry and frightened eyes of a starving child, a terrified mother or a despairing father, the categories blur.

People are walking, running and swimming for their lives. Many are stumbling, falling, drowning and dying along the way. But they have to go somewhere. There is no life in much of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. There is no life in Displaced Persons camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

So now, they’re on the march—coming to Europe and eventually to America. Part of the world cries with them and for them. Part of the world sees human beings in extremis, doing just what we would do in such tragic circumstances.

However, some of the world sees this as a Muslim invasion of Europe and eventually of America. Some see conspiracies. “This is a plot to slowly invade the west and turn the west Muslim.” While I’m sure that there are people who will become terrorists in this suffering mass of humanity, the harsher and more hatefully we treat them, the greater the number whose pain and rage will find expression in violence.

Of course, some will be terrorists. Some folks here became terrorists. Some were born Muslim, and some joined the Jihad from Christian families and even Jewish families. Some are black, some white and some are brown. The people on the march across Asia Minor, the Middle East and Europe are mostly frightened, hungry and desperate human beings. People do not leave home when things are going well. Abandoning ones home, homeland and possessions marks desperation.

How did this tragedy happen, and what are our responsibilities for the present circumstances and the future?

After 9-11 we were told, and it was pretty much accepted, that the terrorists were coming. This was self-evidently true, since 9-11 proved that terrorists were already here. Obviously, we didn’t want a repeat performance. Having been sucker-punched, we were committed to doing everything possible to prevent another attack. And we all believed that another attack was not simply possible but imminent.

On 9-12 and for more than 6 months, we waited for the other shoes to drop. Left and right, we believed that another spectacular series of attacks was on its way. Thus the logic of invading Afghanistan seemed impeccable: “We have to fight the terrorists there or we’ll have to fight them here.”

Our rationale for invading Afghanistan was a bit flawed, since we based it on Afghanistan being the terrorists’ training ground. In fact, the 9-11 hijacking terrorists trained in Venice, Florida, San Diego, California and Norman, Oklahoma. However, bombing any of these places would have been politically problematic and strategically self-defeating. But we had to respond, and next to Antarctica or the Sahara, Afghanistan seemed the best target on which to demonstrate both our displeasure and our resolve.

No sooner was the Taliban seemingly defeated then we turned our attention and hostility towards Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Afghanistan might well have turned into chaos anyway, but we assured the outcome by turning away. We set out to teach Saddam a lesson and block the ambitions of Iran (Saddam’s enemy). We killed Saddam, cast the Sunni army and governing class to the winds and left a client of Iran in charge.

Not content with creating two massively failed states (not counting Libya!) we told Shiite Bashar al-Assad of Syria that “He had to go.” We spoke very loudly and carried no stick at all. Thus we watched and complained as he bombed his own people and then seemed puzzled when Sunnis from both Iraq and Syria felt abandoned by us and became radicalized. This in no way excuses or justifies ISIS, but it certainly explains a lot.

So now people are on the march from their destroyed states and burning homes. Having helped destroy their nations and set their homes alight, we probably should do something other than selling more arms and continuing to bomb and drone their already burning lands.

I live in a seven home cul-de-sac consisting of families that are European Jewish, Persian Jewish, Lebanese Christian, Armenian Christian and Iranian Muslim. I live in a great cul-de-sac, in a great country. If any of our homes caught fire, we would be there for each other with food, water and open hearts and open doors. We’d compete to help.

I’ve received a lot of, what we now call, “pushback” on my article (The Boy & Girl in Red) exhorting us (and our European friends) to be more compassionate and welcoming of the refugees fleeing for their lives from the burning lands that are Syria and Iraq. While other parts of the world also are dangerous, poor and corrupt, there are few places where the violence and inhumanity reach the levels of ISIS and its executions and burning of even their co-religionists, plus Assad’s slaughter by gas and barrel bombs of his own people.

Most of the pushback is based on the idea that some of the refugees may be spies and terrorists. A spokes-monster from ISIS helpfully assures us that indeed they are sending over terrorists among the refugees. The job of ISIS is, of course, to cause maximum pain and problems to all who would escape their clutches.

There can be no doubt that some finite number of refugees will be bad from the get-go, and some will be drawn into trouble. For what group is this not true? We feared that Catholic immigrants would be loyal to the Pope and not our American government. Given our politics and this particular Pope, this seems an attractive thought rather than a threat. We feared those rough and drunken Irish immigrants, those dirty Poles and the Italian Mafia.

Jews from Eastern Europe, like my family, were to be avoided for our customs, languages, business practices and our stubborn refusal to become Christian. Our existence stood as a kind of rebuke to the central faith of the majority culture.

America’s treatment of Asians, whether willing immigrants, refugees or descended from the virtual slaves imported to build the west, was racist and horrific. The “Yellow Peril!”

Haitians were sent back home from fear of HIV and the fact of their blackness. Latinos are even today pictured as posing a threat to our American culture, coming here with their own language and taking our jobs–not to mention crime and gangs. The only non-Protestant and non-European group consistently welcomed has been the Cubans.

The new strangers of every generation generate the same fears and canards, and this in not just in American history but universal and seemingly eternal. The strangers (meaning the “not us”) are, well, not like us. They, the men anyway, are dirty, dishonest, over-sexed, and they want our women. This goes back to biblical times and warnings about all the non-members of ones own tribe.

Yet, for all the Xenophobia, the fears, fact-based and fanciful, we do assimilate. We go to school with each other. We date, mate and even marry. Our children and grandchildren speak English. Still, we fear the stranger in our midst and forget that, once upon a time in America, we were strangers in this strange and beautiful land.

We glory in our American Exceptionalism, and we are exceptional in many good ways. We are generous to our friends, as well as often generous to former enemies. We have fought all around the world and left both a living cultural legacy and the bodies of our fallen. But, unlike our European friends, we did not stay to rule. Our American Empire was more cultural influence than force.

We are strong enough to survive the bad apples that come to us. We spend a disproportionate amount of energy being afraid of the stranger and ignoring the greater and more imminent threats. Certainly, foreign terrorism is a legitimate fear, but numerically it’s nothing next to our domestic violence and the more than 30,000 of each other we kill–most of whom are killed by people they know! The very opposite of the stranger danger. Same goes for sexual assault and rape. We gloss over the fact that 6 times the number of people killed in 9-11 die every year in automobile accidents.

Yes, there are risks in opening our borders, hearts and homeland to any strangers. And yes, at this moment, Muslims seem a unique threat. But as with any group, the opposite of some bad apples is also true: The vast majority of refugees are good. They are simply people who want to live, who want their children to live.

They are on a journey–an old journey, going from the Hebrews escaping Egypt to the Pilgrims coming to America, from the ancestors of Native Americans leaving Asia and the first people of Hawaii’i sailing dangerous dugout canoes from Polynesia. No one undertook any of these journeys lightly or because things were going really nicely at home.

How can people be so heartless?…Hair
When will we ever learn?..Quiet Flows the Don

I look at the picture of the boy laying lifeless on the shores of the Mediterranean, and I want to weep. While critics carry on the cold meta-conversation about showing the body of a dead child, the human truth is that mass suffering doesn’t have the impact of a single, seemingly known, person.

Aylan Kurdi had a name, an age and a tragically short story. Three years old, dressed in a red shirt, blue pants and those tiny shoes on his lifeless feet.

This impactful picture recalls the little girl wearing the red coat in Schindler’s List. It’s one of only four color shots in the three hour movie. Based on an actual incident that opened Schindler’s heart, in the film, it also called on our humanity.

By themselves the facts and numbers are overwhelming. They don’t have the impact of the face of Anne Frank or the girl in red, or Aylan. We personalize pain and loss, and for most of us, our feelings are inverse to the numbers. It’s protective. We couldn’t take the loss of someone whom we truly loved and multiply it by 6 million or 1 million or even 100. That would destroy us.

Yes, we “know” about the famines in Africa. We see pictures of atrocities in Libya, Iraq and Syria, but there are too many bodies and they lack names.

We react differently to the suffering of children. This is built into us. We can inure ourselves to grownups suffering. We can rationalize that they might have done something wrong. But with young children, we really do know better.

The death of an innocent is emotionally compelling. In the evolutionary scheme of things, it has to be. We must be able to give our hearts to those who represent the future, or this whole enterprise, called humanity, would come quickly to a tragic end.

We can try to protect ourselves from drowning in the world’s pain by using heartless truths. “There is suffering but only so much we can do. After all, we can’t take in every immigrant, every poor soul unfortunate enough to have been born somewhere else. We can’t do it all. Others also have responsibilities.” And it’s true.

As we cannot allow war-torn areas of Latin America to empty all their suffering masses on us, we do understand that Europe can’t take in all who are fleeing for their lives. This is when we usually start pointing fingers at each other. For Iraq and Syria, why aren’t the rich Arab states of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates taking the refugees in? This is a good question for which there’s no good answer.

Lebanon is overwhelmed with refugees, and Jordan could tragically blow apart from being over-stuffed with folks fleeing the chaos and danger of their home countries. Turkey does not offer much comfort to either Sunnis or Shiites trying to escape their burning homelands. Why? I have no answer.

Still, whatever the cause or original sin setting people running, walking, crawling and swimming for their lives and the lives of their children, the pain has reached Europe and the question for this moment isn’t who started it or who is most at fault. The question is what do we do?

For us, a nation of immigrants, the terrible irony of not seeing the common humanity in others on the same dangerous pilgrimage is terrible. As Dickens wrote, we must think of each other “really as fellow passengers to the grave and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Those washing up on foreign shores are human beings. We confuse immigrants with refugees. Yes, those who want to better themselves deserve consideration, but for those fleeing for their lives and seeking refuge, we have a positive human obligation.

To the xenophobes who say these foreign cultures will overwhelm us, I say, nonsense. These objections were made towards the Irish, virtually all Roman Catholics, Jews, Italians, Poles, Asians and now Mexicans and Arabs.

We’ve done a pretty good job. Think of it. There isn’t a single WASP on our Supreme Court. Six Catholics, three Jews, three women and an African American. Our national triumph is that we barely notice.

Then there’s the canard that some number of immigrants will be bad. Some will be crooks, some spies. Yes, of course, just as people feared with every wave of immigrants and refugees. It’s true. And we can handle it.